This is cool. I'm curious about what your main marketing channels are. There is another project this reminds me of another project called Simple Analytics.
There are currently 3 trustees of the charity, including myself, and no employees. It’s illegal for trustees to be compensated for work relating to the charity. We’re careful to pick problems (and solutions) that we can make and maintain.
I focus on the engineering, my partner focuses on anything design related, and our third trustee manages finances.
We do it because we’re passionate about it, and the legal structure gives us a lot of weight and ability to negotiate reduced rates with services we depend on. It also sets us up to pay other developers, if/when we decide there’s too much for us to do as a team. Folks might want to donate their time as well, but we will need to be mindful of properly compensating people for their time.
I've been using Clubhouse for a new solo project as well. I love it. It's so much faster than Jira. It's refreshing using something that loads so fast and has a UI that is nice to look at.
I migrated from Trello to Clubhouse because I really needed support for blockers and dependencies, but Trello doesn't have a good way to do that without paying for certain integrations.
I still use Trello for my non-project work, though.
I think this is a misplaced worry. If you’re a high quality engineer than you shouldn’t compete on price. I do some freelance work but and have found it to be extremely lucrative. (Not in the mobile space though FWIW. Mostly NLP projects)
You have to find a niche and provide a ton of value. Being an IOS developer that just delivers features is one way to sell yourself. A better way be positioning yourself is as an IOS expert that knows intricacies which will save the customer $10,000’s in costs via lower maintenance costs, faster dev time, etc
Even with one of the most common software businesses, software consulting, you could reach this amount with 10 people in a fairly straightforward fashion.
10 software engineers at say a salary of $100,000 a year. Consulting rate at 3x would be $3M a year.
I find it strange that the part of the conversation where AI has the potential to save thousands of hours of human labor doesn’t show up more often in these types of threads.
That being said, we need to definitely be thinking about lowering the cost (environmental and monetary) of training these models. I’m glad research is being done within this domain.
I’d love to see a study on what the human labor cost potential vs. training environmental costs would be for certain large models.
I find it interesting that you see 'save thousands of hours of human labor' as something that's surely positive. What should those people start doing instead? They also need an income to get bread on the table.
Whatever makes them happy, petting their dog, having a conversation with their friends/family, make some music that one person listens to, literally anything produces more value for society than performing arbitrary unnecessary labor which could be automated for near-zero marginal cost.
We should divert that capital to something more productive, tax the process and kick them back a basic income to do whatever they want with. If what they really want to do is what they currently do at their job, whatever, they can keep doing it while supporting themselves on the basic income, but that'd be their uncoerced choice.
Most people are unhappy at work and only go because they are required to to survive. If our society weren't so myopic and steeped in puritan ethics this would be as absurd as asking whether the thirteenth amendment was going to be surely positive.
Work gives us purpose. There is no substitute for enjoying the fruits of one's labor. Working on teams anchors us socially. On the flip side, working for someone else with little agency and decompression time is not very enjoyable.
Between pointless distraction and work, most people will pick the latter, especially after a solid decompression period, in spite of the surface enjoyability balance favoring the former.
True. The point is that at a personal level leisure is no long term substitute for work.
On organizing work. Chances are that at some point you'll want to work on things beyond the scope of what you can accomplish on your own. Or want to have a larger impact on the world / other people's lives. The big question is how to organize the work of people at society level. The pay per work model has proven to be very effective and gave us the marvels of the modern world.
On the shadow side, the pay per work model has become heavily geared towards exploitation, as in exploration vs. exploitation. We are at a point where worker conditions in a BigTech warehouse, or as a mechanicized Turk, are meticulously quantified exploitation. At the same time, we find it natural to expend the energy budget of a small city to enable machines do large-scale exploration.
Apply it backwards - would a welfare system of having people complete large N Tower of Hanoi locks that pay people money be a good idea?
On one hand technically it is better than nothing immediately for those in need and is fraud resistant in that it consumes time and any better paying job without major negative externalities would be a better use of their time.
The negative is that it does nothing productive and those who are dependent on it aren't able to use their time productively on anything else.
While the problem of lack of income and lack of good uses for their labor certainly should be addressed just because it provides income doesn't make it a good thing overall.
It is one of those things which puts the "dismal" in the "dismal science" term for economics - regardless of any misgivings over calling it a science. It is essentially a subset of human organizational and incentive problems which the economy "is designed" (technically more emergant even if it is literally a planned economy) to solve.
If X becomes cheaper, humans spend the surplus resources on Y. If Y becomes cheaper, humans spend the surplus resources on Z. And on it goes.
"Save thousands of hours of human labor" doesn't mean humanity is working thousands of hours less total; it means that they accomplished the same specific X with thousands fewer hours (and then almost certainly spend thousands of hours on Y).
That's not just an armchair theory. Time-honored tradition of technology advancement. Agriculture fell from 70% to 25% of all U.S. jobs in a single lifetime. Staggering economic change. And humanity is better off for it.
Won't lowering the cost/complexity of deep learning just allow those with more resources to increase the complexity of their models while keeping the costs the same?
This is a great first step. College athletes are extremely exploited. The amount of value they bring the universities vs. benefits they currently receive is laughable. It's wild to read about coaches who make millions of dollars per year coaching these teams complain about the athletes being entitled.
Interesting to see deep learning techniques entering the realms of non-cs focused academia. I recently heard of another example from the Planet Money podcast[1], that used deep learning to perform an elephant census.
One of my favorite things about ML is using it to reduce human labor hours on tasks like these.
I used to be in the trades. I read hacker news when I started getting into programming and now I work full time as a software engineer. So.. yes non-tech folks read hacker news!
